Mexican Screen Fiction

Between Cinema and Television

Paul Julian Smith

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745681252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Mexican cinema is booming today, a decade after the international successes of Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. Mexican films now display a wider range than any comparable country, from art films to popular genre movies, and boasting internationally renowned directors like Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. At the same time, television has broadened its output, moving beyond telenovelas to produce higher-value series and mini-series. Mexican TV now stakes a claim to being the most dynamic and pervasive national narrative. This new book by Paul Julian Smith is the first to examine the flourishing of audiovisual fiction in Mexico since 2000, considering cinema and TV together. It covers much material previously unexplored and engages with emerging themes, including violence, youth culture, and film festivals. The book includes reviews of ten films released between 2001 and 2012 by directors who are both established (Maryse Sistach, Carlos Reygadas) and new (Jorge Michel Grau, Michael Rowe, Paula Markovitch). There is also an appendix that includes interviews carried out by the author in 2012 with five audiovisual professionals: a feature director, a festival director, an exhibitor, a producer, and a TV screenwriter. Mexican Screen Fiction will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars and essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most vibrant audiovisual industries in the world today.

Jump Cut 1

Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Mexican cinema is on a roll. Despite the political turmoil and crisis that plague the government-funded film institute IMCINE, it has produced a string of local hits. These have most recently been crowd-pleasing comedies that couldn't be more different from earnest art movies by the likes of Arturo Ripstein that are usually distributed abroad. Domestic cinema may even survive proposals, condemned by Ripstein and others, to increase the market for US imports – now shown only with subtitles – by dubbing them into Spanish. Nostalgic for the Golden Age of the 1940s, when the Mexican industry was one of the world's largest, boasting stars like Dolores del Río and directors like Emilio Fernández (not to mention Buñuel), local producers hope this latest revival may be here to stay.

Alfonso Cuarón's smart and sexy road movie Y tu mamá también broke the all-time domestic box-office record for a Mexican film, taking $2.2 million in its opening week, despite a widely ignored ‘X’ rating that should have excluded much of its target audience. A reprise of the oldest story in the book, Y tu mamá también tells the tale of two teenage hedonists, wealthy Tenoch (Diego Luna) and poor Julio (Gael García Bernal), who take off from the city with unhappily married Spaniard Luisa (Maribel Verdú) in search of a mythical beach called Boca del Cielo (Heaven's Mouth). Y tu mamá también is both a love-triangle and a coming-of-age movie in which, in the familiar cliché, ‘none of them would be the same after that summer’.

Writing in Variety, Mexican film scholar Leonardo García Tsao dismisses the film as a ‘south-of-the-border Beavis & Butthead’, its protagonists ‘oversexed and underdeveloped’. He also describes the theme of a boy's sexual education by an older woman as a fantasy ‘straight out of Penthouse’. There's no doubt many viewers read the film in this way: a glance at the messages posted on the film's official website confirms this salacious response. But most of the film's frequent and graphic nudity is male, for example when the two boys are shown desperately servicing their girlfriends before the latter leave on holiday in the opening sequences. In a later shower scene, Luna gamely wears a prosthetic glans (unlike the actor, his character Tenoch is circumcised). To accuse the film of crudeness is not only to misread its grungy technique but to confuse the characters' viewpoints with the film's own. Apparently a slight comedy, packed with the lewdness for which Mexican speech is famous, Y tu mamá también subtly revises models of gender and national identity for a new Mexico and a new international audience.

Cuarón himself is eager to disassociate himself from what he calls a ‘cinema of denunciation’: the explicitly political output of an earlier generation of engaged auteurs who explored poverty and exploitation among the underclass, or attacked US imperialism. Cuarón is willing to risk being branded as superficial because his film is entertaining, treacherous because it draws on US culture, and reactionary because it deals with bourgeois characters. Yet his attack on what he calls ‘ideology’ could itself be read as ideological. Julio's sister, a leftist student who supports the Zapatista rebels, is given short shrift: she exists only to loan the boys the battered car in which they make their trip. The opening sequences in Mexico City include such high-end locations as Tenoch's palatial home and a plush country club, and the official website unashamedly plays for pleasure: surfers are invited to tour the characters’ station wagon, dress the boys in their favoured grungy garments and shoot down flying phalluses that flit across the screen.

Nevertheless, there's no doubt that, like Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores perros (2000), which also starred the charismatic García Bernal, Y tu mamá también marks a new cinematic moment that coincides with a new political order. Indeed, its sober closing sequence refers explicitly to the defeat in July 2000 of the oddly named Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which had ruled Mexico with the dead hand of corruption for seventy-one years. With the election of new president Vicente Fox of the rightist National Action Party (PAN), Mexicans were more than ready for political and cultural change. The first film to herald the end of the ancien régime was Luis Estrada's political satire Herod's Law (La ley de Herodes [1999]), a cause célèbre after the PRI-controlled IMCINE tried in vain to prevent its distribution. But while La ley de Herodes is too local to appeal to foreigners, Y tu mamá también's coming-of-age story has hit a universal nerve, winning film awards for Best Screenplay and Best Newcomer at 2001's Venice festival.

Rejecting the glossy professionalism of his Hollywood features A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1997), Cuarón employs a loose and supple technique. The plot develops, in true road-movie fashion, with apparent spontaneity, helped by the fact that the film was shot in sequence with the actors seeming to change and mature over the 105 minutes of its running time. The camera work is seemingly artless: Cuarón's account of his collaboration with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki recalls Buñuel's relationship with Gabriel Figueroa in that both seek to avoid prettiness, refusing to film if the light or landscape is too beautiful. Cuarón and Lubezki also favour sequence shots – when Luisa goes off with the boys, the camera watches her linger in her apartment and go out of the door before simply wandering to the window to see her exit into the street below. Performances appear improvised. García Bernal and Luna are real-life long-time friends, first having worked together at the age of twelve. Their intimacy and awkwardness in the sex scenes seem quite unforced, while their expert chilango (Mexico City dialect) will prove as opaque to outsiders as it is to the Spanish Luisa.

But just as the seeming absence of ideology is itself ideological, so the apparently artless form relies on artistry. Though the actors contributed to the script during the rehearsal process, the screenplay (by Cuarón and his brother Carlos) is deceptively well made. When they set out on their journey, the two boys recite a Rabelaisian manifesto to Luisa – it comes down to ‘do what you want’ (but don't screw another guy's girlfriend). Towards the end of what is now an exhausting trek, Luisa lays down the law herself, improvising an alternative, woman-centred manifesto. Dramatic irony ensures the audience knows more than the characters: we have seen Luisa split up with her philandering husband, but the boys have not.

The casual-looking cinematography is also smarter than it appears. When the camera strays from the table where the main characters are enjoying a meal, it is to enter the kitchen where Indian women cook. As the trio crudely discusses sexual techniques in the car, they pass roadblocks where we glimpse soldiers interrogating peasants. In long shot, the car, suddenly diminished, vanishes in the vast landscape or appears behind women washing clothes in a river. If framing unobtrusively makes a political point, then so does editing. Cuarón cuts for contrast: from the sunny swimming pool where the boys jerk off together to the fantasized image of ‘Salmita’ Hayek to the dark bedroom where a solitary Luisa confronts her husband's infidelity on the phone. A student demonstration in the city is juxtaposed with the teenagers' trip to a vast supermarket in the suburbs – a temple to consumerism.

Favouring long shots and lengthy takes as the film does, its principals need all their professional technique to keep control. Cuarón has said that initially he intended to cast amateurs, but they couldn't give the performances he required. The experience of Maribel Verdú, veteran of some thirty films in Spain, anchors the relative newcomers García Bernal and Luna. From a prim, melancholy wife (dressed in ivory satin), she is transformed into a denim-clad sexual predator who takes on the boys in a seedy motel and on the back seat of a car. Her voyage of discovery thus complements the teenagers' more familiar quest for identity. All three are at their best in a final drunken dinner scene, a tour de force that lasts for an unbroken take of seven minutes.

But the strongest indication of the unforced seriousness of this sexy, funny film lies in its use of voice-over. Throughout, dead-pan, third-person narration informs us of what the characters can never know or choose not to reveal. Speeding heedlessly through the city, the young lovers are ignorant of the fact that a migrant worker has been killed on the same road. Later Tenoch doesn't tell his companions they are passing the village of his Indian nanny, whom he called ‘mother’ until he was four. The fisherman the characters meet on the magical beach will, we are told, be displaced by a luxury hotel. Cuarón cites Godard as an inspiration for the voice-over and Y tu mamá también can be re-read as a Mexican nouvelle vague, deftly skewering the Latin American cinéma de papa even as it shares aspects of its predecessors' social critique.

The notorious Oedipal Mexican profanity to which the title refers is also incorporated and ironized. Luisa may be a mother-whore or Penthouse fantasy, but she has hidden motives for her sexual abandon. Moreover, she loudly exposes the homoeroticism underlying Mexican machismo, claiming the boys only fight like dogs because they want to fuck each other. Gender stereotypes are revised, culminating in a final twist that has disconcerted some fans, just as national identity is re-evaluated. The only sign of fetishistic folklore is at a glamorous wedding where charros (cowboys) and mariachis perform in a muddy arena. But Cuarón's camera pointedly abandons the wealthy masters to follow a maid taking food to the chauffeurs outside. Or again the camera tracks after Tenoch's nanny as she treks through the huge family house to deliver a sandwich and answer the phone ringing unheeded at his side. The ‘cinema of denunciation’ Cuarón critiques is not so much abandoned in Y tu mamá también as fully and unselfconsciously integrated into the film's narrative and form.

Important here is a new aspect of cultural nationalism: Mexicanness need no longer be defined in opposition to the US. Cultural commentator Carlos Monsiváis has recently noted Mexico's naturalization of Hallowe'en, a holiday hitherto unknown. Likewise, Cuarón Mexicanizes the US genre of the road movie and is confident enough to employ a gloriously hybrid soundtrack. While the script was written to the sound of Frank Zappa's melancholy instrumental ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’, the songs booming from the boys' cassette player stray from Eno and Natalie Imbruglia to Latin dance numbers. Most telling is the fact that the term charolastra, which the boys use to describe themselves (an invented word said to mean ‘space cowboy’), is derived from misunderstood English-language lyrics overheard on the radio. This is significant because the idiosyncratic speech is the most local element in the film: the Castilian-speaking Luisa repeatedly asks the boys to translate their chilango, and while Y tu mamá también has been shown around the world, most Spanish speakers are partly excluded from its dialogue. As sociologist Manuel Castells has written, globalization is combined with a resurgence of intense localism. The website is intriguing here – surfers from Montevideo to Madrid lament their failure to understand chilango but an equal number post their fan mail in versions of that same idiolect. Like a Mexican A Clockwork Orange, Y tu mamá también schools its consumers in a rich and strange idiom.

If the language remains irredeemably local, the same goes for the landscape. Heading south and east of the capital through the impoverished states of Puebla and Oaxaca to the Pacific coast, Y tu mamá también reveals unselfconsciously and unobtrusively a Mexico rarely seen on screen. The travellers chance on popular traditions: a local carnival queen being used to extract money from cars stopped on the highway; an ancient woman standing guard over an indigenous altar where saints and candles mingle with fluffy toys. And when we finally, miraculously, reach the longed-for beach, we are not allowed to forget the ravages of tourism on this unspoilt environment as the voice-over informs us that the fisherman the friends encounter will end up as a hotel caretaker. The ‘magical, musical Mexico’ toasted by the drunken trio is both ironically celebrated and ruefully mourned.

In a final, downbeat sequence the two boys meet up by accident back in the city. This is the only time the voice-over is explicitly political – the PRI has, we are told, just lost the presidential elections. Cuarón has described Mexico as an ‘adolescent’ country, struggling to grow up and acknowledge aspects of itself for which it was not prepared. The sombre dialogue here (filmed in shot/reverse shot as opposed to the wide shots and long takes favoured in the rest of the film) suggests the boys’ quest for identity is equally unsettling: there are some things about ourselves we would prefer not to know.

While the decline of state funding for film is disturbing in a country where the government was for so long a major participant in production, Y tu mamá también (like Amores perros before it) is testimony to a sector newly invigorated in part by private money. Like the equally surprising Argentine renaissance, the revival of Mexican film will lead to destinations that cannot be predicted. This is the final moral of Cuarón's artfully artless road movie.

Sight & Sound (April 2002)

Part I

Setting Scenes

1

Revising Mexican Cinema

Repeating and Renewing

In October 2008 a special issue of the cultural magazine Letras Libres put an evocative image on its cover, reworked from a nineteenth-century engraving of the Zócalo or main square of Mexico City: on the left is the Cathedral, looking as it always has, but to the right, perfectly preserved, is the long-destroyed Aztec temple, which had originally stood in that place, complete with Mexican flag hoisted proudly at its summit. Within this issue are collected essays offering alternative versions (or ‘revisions’) of Mexican history, imagining (as in the cover image) that the Spanish and Aztec cultures had reached an accommodation, or even that the indigenous civilizations had conquered the conquistadors and survived to our time. According to the editor of the magazine, ‘Mexico is, for better and for worse, what it is. But it could have been otherwise.’ (‘México es, para bien y para mal, lo que es. Pero pudo haber sido de otro modo.’) These ‘imagined pasts’ or ‘invisible Mexicos’ are ‘ghosts’ used to ‘combat historical determinism and intellectual resignation’ (‘combatir el determinismo histórico y la resignación intelectual’, 2008: 7).

This first chapter explores some recent revisions of the national narrative of Mexican cinema, which are perhaps similar to those suggested by Letras Libres in the case of the Mexican nation and which offer radically different perspectives on the development of this cinema. These revisions are: the special issue of Artes de México entitled precisely ‘Revisión del cine mexicano’, focused on the so-called ‘Golden Age’; Julia Tuñón's reinterpretation of that Golden Age from the perspective of gender and women's studies (a feminist approach much less familiar in Mexico than in the USA or UK); and two recent case studies of Mexican cinema from the UK and Mexico, by Andrea Noble and Lucila Hinojosa Córdova respectively. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three feature films of the millennium that exemplify this process of revision (of repetition and re-creation) which I have proposed as central to current Mexican film and its relation to the past. It is no coincidence that all three address the theme of adolescence, emblematic of a cinema that, despite a long and rich history, still regards itself as somewhat immature and underdeveloped.

But first, a few comments on the concept of ‘revision’ that I am proposing. In a historiographical context, the term ‘revisionism’ has nuances in English that are contradictory and even disturbing. On the one hand, it is used in cases of transparent and ideologically motivated mendacity, as in the denial of the Holocaust; but it is also used, like its Spanish cognate, to name a continuous and necessary process under which canonical ideas are put to the test, citing new materials and new hypotheses.

Likewise, according to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, ‘revisionismo’ is the ‘tendency to submit established doctrines, interpretations or practices to methodical revision with the aim of updating them’ (‘tendencia a someter a revisión metódica doctrinas, interpretaciones o prácticas establecidas con la pretensión de actualizarlas’, DRAE, 2012: s.v. revisionismo). This is how I understand ‘revision’ in the context of Mexican cinema, irrespective of how different the successive versions of this phenomenon may be. In the words of Letras Libres once more, such revisions are fighting against historical determinism and intellectual resignation. Secondly, if I may return to a theoretical model that is now somewhat outdated, revision as it is presented here is a ‘supplement’ in both senses of Jacques Derrida's use of the term: it is both the insertion of an additional element that serves to fill a gap or absence and the replacement of an existing element with a new one (1998: 141). I suggest that the logic of the revision, then, as in the case of the supplement, is both cumulative and substitutive.

This process is seen even in the least ambitious of my materials, the special issue of Artes de México, which originated in an exhibition of photographs on the legends of Mexican cinema held in the capital's Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes) in 1990 (the issue was re-published in 2001). The magazine, beautifully produced, is presented in general terms as an encyclopedia of cultures in Mexico, resurrected (it was first founded in 1951) to give a new perspective on visual culture and using a method that ‘ranges between history of mentalities and cultural studies’ (‘oscila entre la historia de las mentalidades y los estudios culturales’, 2001: no page number).

The issue itself is presented in a wilfully paradoxical way as a ‘visual narrative’ and ‘an image essay’ (‘narrativa visual … ensayo de imágenes’, 2001: 25), both of which are carried out by means of the glamorous photos that occupy the vast majority of its pages. The texts, on the other hand, are rather brief and based on interviews with well-known figures in their respective f...